I've been trying to wrap my mind around the
dispiriting sense of failure that seems to have enveloped the Obama
administration on the eve of the November midterms. The right hates him
because he won, because he's Black, and because he won. Their utter
intransigence has completely upended Obama's knee-jerk instinct for
compromise and bipartisanship, making it appear that he's not getting
anything done, and so the middle of the electorate feels a deep sense of
disappointment exacerbated by unrelentingly bad coverage in the media.
The left is up in arms because he hasn't met the lofty goals set after
his election, and because he's allowed himself to get rolled by the
right and their corporate paymasters on half a dozen occasions,
resulting in several half-a-loaf pieces of legislation that look more
like giveaways than accomplishments.

But there's a missing piece in here somewhere, and strangely enough, it took a recent Sports Illustrated article
to bring the situation into focus for me. The article dealt with the
scandal surrounding former USC running back and Heisman Trophy winner
Reggie Bush, whose involvement with agents and payoffs during his
college career led the NCAA to punish USC severely for his, and their,
transgressions. Rather than face the issue head-on and offer mea
culpas, USC chose instead to erase the Bush legacy from the annals of
their sports history:

As promised and with great flourish, USC officials
last week swept Reggie Bush's disgraced Heisman Trophy from the stately
foyer of Heritage Hall. On this occasion the university's famed marching
band was not called upon to play a dirge, nor was the squatty,
stiff-armed statuette carried out by six Trojan students wearing number 5
football jerseys with "619" eye-black patches stuck to their faces, as
if to mourn a legacy fallen deeply into shame.

This seems like a missed opportunity because it would
have been a sweet photo op, capturing the moment when sport formally
completed the transition into its Age of Revisionism.

It's all part of a new paradigm, in which you thumb
through the record books with a marker in hand, circle some items as
genuine and draw lines through others as clearly tainted. At USC they're
actually doing this; the next edition of the Trojans' football media
guide will contain at least 100 asterisks and italicized notations,
qualifying the performances of the Bush era.

A light went on in my head while reading the words
"Age of Revisionism" and "qualifying the performances of the Bush era."
For USC, that means Reggie. For the rest of us, those lines can just
as easily apply to George W. and his own disgraceful tenure as
president. That's the missing piece, and though it should be obvious,
we seem to have forgotten how much of a wretched impact his years in the
Oval Office had and continue to have on this nation and the world.

Part of the reason we've managed to forget, of
course, is that he's been gone for almost two years now. Under normal
circumstances, that tends to put the onus on the current president;
Obama has been holding the reins with a Democratically-controlled
congress on Capitol Hill for eighteen months, and therefore all eyes
tend to fall on him. The problem is that no president in American
history has done more damage and screwed us worse than George W. Bush
did. In the nearly 3,000 days he spent in office, Bush cut the country
to ribbons in ways that have never been seen before, and the impact of
that era lingers to this day.

The main reason for our forgetfulness, however, can
be found on your television and in the pages of your newspaper. The
media has completely redacted the impact of the Bush era from their
coverage of the Obama administration, a continuing act of deception that
I believe is completely deliberate. The entire Bush administration is a
lesson in media cowardice and complicity; they rolled over for him for
virtually every one of those 3,000 days, and would now like to have us
all forget it happened. If as Bush falls in the forest and the media
doesn't cover it, did it happen? Certainly, but when the daily grind of
the 24-hour news cycle omits the idiot elephant that remains in the
room, the narrative of the present becomes skewed and distorted.

There are a dozen examples of this available, but the
two best also happen to be the two heaviest millstones currently
hanging around Obama's neck: the war in Afghanistan, and the BP oil
disaster still unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico.

The recent Wikileaks document dump may not have been a
blockbuster on the order of the Pentagon Papers, but it served to
underscore how much of a mess the war in Afghanistan is. Pundits on the
left and right have taken to call Afghanistan "Obama's war" - RNC
chairman Michael Steele went so far as to claim that Obama was the one
who got us into it - even though the war had been going on for almost a
decade when he took office. Granted, he's been commander-in-chief for a
year and a half, and his decision to send more troops puts the outcome
in Afghanistan right in his hip pocket. This cannot be disputed, but
the media coverage of the Wikileaks documents utterly failed to note a
fact of singular importance: the discussion of the war described in
those documents is focused on George W. Bush's failed handling of that
war. Except in the independent media, the narrative has been "Oooh,
these documents show a war going badly, this must be Obama's fault." No
mention of Bush, the big missing piece in everything we're dealing
with, again.

As for the Gulf, well, you must have heard by now
that it is "Obama's Katrina." Beyond the reference to one of the signal
debacles of the Bush era, George's name has hardly come up in the
coverage of the BP catastrophe...except it was the Bush administration
who fully and completely enabled the elements that led to the disaster
in the first place, thanks to their cozy relationship with the oil
industry and their passion for deregulating everything that moved. The
government agency in charge of keeping an eye on offshore drilling
operations spent the Bush administration having coke-and-hooker parties
on the taxpayer's dime, and why not? They must have been bored out of
their minds. After all, how should a regulator spend his time in an
administration that had no interest in enforcing any form of regulation
at all? Once again, Mr. Bush and his 3,000 days are the missing piece
in the narrative.

Mr. Obama's performance to date has not lived up to
expectations, to be sure. He simply must do better - and, pssssst, Mr.
President, your best move might be to forego this nonsense about
compromising with the GOP and just get stuff done through
reconciliation, filibuster reform and the ever-handy Executive Order -
but the public's collective impression of his performance to date has
been thoroughly skewed by the absence in our national discussion of the
last guy to occupy the Oval. The media wants you to forget George W.
Bush ever happened.

Don't fall for it.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.